First Light

The man in Dorking was selling it because his knees had gone. That's what he said. "Can't do the kneeling anymore." Eight-inch Dobsonian, a tube the size of a hot water tank on a plywood base, and he'd built the base himself in 2009 and you could tell, it had that solidity that shop things don't. Two hundred and forty pounds. I'd have paid more. I think he knew. I'd wanted one since I was nine. That's a long time to want a thing and not get it, and the reasons are the usual ones: money, then a flat with no garden, then a garden but a marriage that needed the money for other things, then no marriage and, suddenly, a garden and a Saturday and a man in Dorking with bad knees. The first three nights were cloud. Of course they were. I set the thing up on the patio anyway and sat next to it with a cup of tea like it was a dog that might need company. Fourth night, Tuesday, clear by ten. I'd read the guides. I knew, in theory, that you find Saturn by finding the bright thing in the southeast that doesn't twinkle. There were several bright things. None of them were labelled. It took me forty minutes. Forty minutes of nudging a tube the size of a hot water tank by hand, squinting through a finder scope that I'd not aligned properly, losing the thing, finding it, losing it again, my neck cricked, my tea gone cold on the wall. And then it was there. I don't know how to describe it to someone who hasn't. It's small. That's the first thing. You expect the photographs and you get a bright dot with a bit of a shape to it, and then your eye settles, and the shape becomes a ring, a real ring, a thin hard line of light around a sphere, with a gap of black between them, and it's so obviously a thing, so clearly an object hanging in space and not a picture of one, that something in your chest turns over.

I made a noise. Not a word. A sort of "oh" that came out louder than I meant it to. Next door's bathroom light came on. Then off. I looked for an hour. It drifted out of view every couple of minutes because the earth was turning, which I'd known, obviously, but had never felt as a physical fact until I had to keep pushing a tube to follow a planet across the sky. I found a moon, a tiny spark next to it. Titan, the app said. I said "Titan" out loud, to nobody. At half eleven I went in and sat in the kitchen with the lights off, still seeing it. I'm forty-three. I've seen the Grand Canyon and my daughter being born and the sea at night from a ferry. This was in that list. I don't fully know why, and I've stopped needing to. I messaged the man in Dorking. I didn't have to. I said, "Saw Saturn tonight. Thank you for the base." He wrote back in the morning. "Knew you would. Try Jupiter next. Four moons if you're lucky. Mind your knees."